Enabling high-fidelity neutron transport simulations on petascale architectures

The UNIC code is being developed as part of the DOE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. UNIC is an unstructured, deterministic neutron transport code that allows a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor. The primary goal of our simulation efforts is to reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calculations by progressively replacing existing multilevel averaging (homogenization) techniques with more direct solution methods based on first principles. Since the neutron transport equation is seven dimensional (three in space, two in angle, one in energy, and one in time), these simulations are among the most memory and computationally intensive in all of computational science. In order to model the complex physics of a reactor core, billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles, and thousands of energy groups are necessary, leading to problem sizes with petascale degrees of freedom. Therefore, these calculations exhaust memory res...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SC
• Authors: Dinesh K. Kaushik, Micheal Smith, Allan Wollaber, Barry Smith, Andrew Siegel, Won Sik Yang
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Neutron Transport, Reactor Design, Reactor Design Calculations, SC 2009